Transform your Back Office into an Innovation Hub

Every successful organization has a robust and fully automated back office supporting it. Not just for efficiencies, but to foster innovation.

Enterprises have spent most part of the last decade digitizing and transforming their front office. The reason? Well, they felt that front office transformation is critical to improve the customer experience and scale rapidly. While it is true to a certain extent,

“A true digital transformation is incomplete without digitizing and automating the back-office operations.”

Back-Office Digitization – True Differentiator

The total digital transformation model shows the long journey ahead to make the organization truly digital and scale the customer experience to a new level. The Front office digitization is not the end of the digital journey, but just the beginning.

It’s true that the back-office operations have been traditionally ignored and they still carry several manual processes. Today, front office digital transformation has changed the business models and the customers are now in direct contact with the back-office operations for customer service. While the front office was ready for such interactions, the back-office was not given enough focus and is under prepared.

A case in point – most of the customers in the digital world are using self-service options and are interacting directly with the enterprise’s information systems to transact, submit requests, get customer service and perform operations, such as download/upload. The back-office has to support in aspects, such as faster response to customers, high availability of the infrastructure, bill generation, transaction processing.

It is clear that the underprepared back office is not living up to the promises of the digital world made by the organization and eventually hurting the customer experience.

Now you see that the true digital transformation is only half the job done with front office digitization. The real differentiator to accelerate customer experience is when the back-office is fully digitized too. The iceberg is large at the bottom that needs the immediate attention.

Digital Transformation Checklist

Ask yourselves these questions and you will know if your organization is fully digital:

• Are your back-office operations, such as ITSM, asset management, service lifecycle management fully digitized and automated?
• Are your business functions unified through a single platform and that no more silos exist?
• Are your back-office functions making the employees super-efficient and working at the speed of light?
• Is your back-office is aligned with the customer-experience goals of your front office?
• Is your back-office generating insights that can help improve the customer experience?
• Is your back-office operating an innovation hub that has strategic importance to the organization?

If you’ve answered yes to all of the questions, then most probably, your organization is fully set for the digital world. If not, it is time to rethink the back-office strategy and be fully digital. Proven strategies can help you transform the back office into an innovation hub that works hand-in-hand with the front office to deliver incredible customer experience.